One my favorite Civil War letter writers is William Tecumseh Sherman. He wrote with a forthrightness and candor that I find refreshing. And one my favorite Sherman letters was written on August 24, 1862. The recipient was Thomas Hunton, a former West Point classmate of Sherman, who by 1862 was an attorney in New Orleans and a slaveholder. A native of Kentucky, Hunton was by then a long-time resident of the Crescent City and had sided with the Confederacy in the war, but sought his old friend’s help in recovering slaves that apparently had escaped upriver, possibly to Memphis, where Sherman was at the time in command of the Army of the Tennessee’s 5th Division and Union military governor of the city. So having spent considerable time in the South before the Civil War, where he had proved sympathetic to slaveholders, and with many southern friends, it makes sense that a desperate Hunton would reach out to his old classmate.

Sherman was certainly willing to reaffirm his friendship with Thomas Hunton. He wrote:

So if Thomas Hunton thought he might rely on his old friendship with “Cump” Sherman to get back his slaves he was mistaken. Although the General then admitted essentially no sympathy for the slaves, neither did he have much regard for rebel slaveholders, even if they were an old friend.

So if Thomas Hunton had not been yet acquainted with the concept of “contraband of war,” his old friend forthrightly described it to him as was the style of William Tecumseh Sherman. What a friend. What an education.

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About Donald R. Shaffer

Donald R. Shaffer is the author of _After the Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans_ (Kansas, 2004), which won the Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship in 2005. More recently he published (with Elizabeth Regosin), _Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files_ (2008). Dr. Shaffer teaches online exclusively (i.e., a virtual professor). He lives in Arizona and can be contacted at donald_shaffer@yahoo.com